


Moonstag

by baeberiibungh



Category: Hannibal (TV)
Genre: AU, Child Will, Creature Hannibal, Fairy Tales, Imaginary Friend, M/M, Not
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-29
Updated: 2015-12-29
Packaged: 2018-05-10 05:13:02
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,230
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5572294
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/baeberiibungh/pseuds/baeberiibungh
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Little Will has a friend who can be seen only in moonlight...</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

Alice sometimes worried about her little son. He was so small and quiet and always living in the land of fairy tales and the absurd stories her maid told Will. He would listen with his thumb stuck in his small mouth and lightly sucking on it, curled up on the broad waist and stomach of Netitia while she gesticulated wildly with her other hand while one kept him safe and warm next to the soft and warm bosom. Will did not like the young princes who went on to save the princesses from tall ivory towers, but he would be full of questions about the dragons that seemed to erupt everywhere there was a princess without any rhyme or reason. 

So Netitia told Will of the tales she had heard back in her home by the marsh when she was a little girl, living with her seven brother and two other sisters, looking for tuber and roots to eat near the marsh and learning the sounds the marsh made on its own and those it made when some other beings walked soft and quick over its lumpy ground. One of them Will loved to hear about was the moonstag. Netitia in fact admitted to seeing him once, out of the corner of her eye, quick as lightening and twice as fast and how it had shone! Netitia of course never told anything in presence of Alice and even Will knew never to ask before his mother.

Alice definitely suspected, conscious of how Will was being looked after Netitia basically, as Alice lay weak and pale from her illness. It was just a touch of bad weather the physician would say when Alice would implore her husband to get him, her hands clammy and shoulders shivering. ‘Just a female’s delicate disposition’ the doctor would say to Alice’s husband, the hint of smile in his voice, his eyes not seeing the pain either on her face or the lines they were drawing on her body. Her husband would be again convinced that she is just a little ill and actually wants some attention so he would talk with her a bit before leaving for work again.

There were friends and family initially, come to visit her and take care of her, but most left within a few days, unable to get Will’s father or make Will come to them or make Netitia listen to them, to get the stables to look after their mares or to get the maid to clean their dirty clothes. Will’s father ran the house with his absence, Alice with her sickness, Netitia with her fierceness to protect Will and Will with his innate inability to see other humans as anything reaching curiosity. To Will, they were just annoying fiends who pinched his cheeks hard and pretended to smile at him while never meaning it. He was certainly the happiest when people stopped coming to their house.

Alice got worse, so much so that even the doctor started looking for the cause of her illness seriously. Will’s father would hover around to get her more medicine, Will some more clothes and play things and Netitia enough money to keep the house running and then he would disappear again. The few times Will asked, Netitia just said ‘back on his accursed boat’ and that was the end of it. Will would sometimes visit his mother, but her fever bright eyes that looked around her in quick movements and the way she drooled on her collars so that Netitia had to keep a bib on her at all times made Will uneasy to be in the room. The woman lying in the bed was already starting to feel not like his mother.

One of the side effects of such isolating circumstances was that Will grew obsessed about the moon stag, bugging Netitia repeatedly for more details about that creature, and the good woman that Netitia was, she complied. She told him of the stag’s rack that was as huge as the body of the stag and could actually cut through moonbeams at its strongest and that was why broken moonbeams hung from its antlers like silvery streamers. Its body was silver and the same silver of a newly bathed moon, not red, not blue, not yellow, but silver. It was a cruel creature of the world unseen, and loved tormenting anyone its eye would lay on. Netitia swore on her heart that the moonstag let her go by some miracle when she ended up seeing it.

The moonstag’s foot print, if preserved accurately, would grow wild flowers that would shine like the moon in moonless nights, but when they died, left behind a black spot on the ground, darker than anything anyone had ever seen and nothing would grow in that spot again. Then, there were tales, Netitia would whisper, when the moonstag ate humans, bad humans, humans who did not give the moonstag the respect he was due, enough bites of food from one’s plate in offering, or safe passage to wanderers through one’s lands. The moonstag did not hold with undue rudeness, and made sure to punish rude children. In the meantime, Will would listen on, his eyes faraway and hazy as he thought of the moonstag.


	2. Chapter 2

The night Alice died, Will’s father was out in his boat again and no one could find him for two days while his wife started to smell and go soggy into the bed. Netitia finally decided with the help of the parish priest that Alice better get a burial before she ends up getting cremated right off her mattress. Will held on to Netitia’s hand the duration of the service and did not cry one tear at the loss of his mother. Many said that he saw simply in shock, while others said that he was too young to even understand the concept of death. But Will did understand, Will understood that his mother was never coming back again and found an almost pleasantly seething rage growing against his father.

That night Will sat in his father’s library, in some muddled hope of finding him first when he returns from his trip. But poor little Will, exhausted by the death and burial of his one only mother fell asleep. Will woke up suddenly in the middle of the night, the whole house in darkness, the small candle having sputtered away that Netitia had left for him. He realised he woke up because he had heard footsteps. Looking around, he saw that something right outside the library was giving off a very clear light. Wondering what it was and whether it was perhaps his father, Will stepped out of the library, his pyjamas almost falling off his thin body and gave a loud gasp.

It was the moonstag! It was just as Netitia had described, with moonbeam streamers on its rack and skin silvery that shivered with the thrumming nerves underneath. It pawed at the concrete under its hoofs and Will suddenly wanted to touch and feel it’s sides, to see if it was as silky as it looked. As if already knowing what Will is thinking about, the stag comes near Will and presses its flank onto Will. Will gives a quite whoop of wonder at the silken smooth, almost like heavy milk but drier, skin and starts running his small pudgy little hands all over it. Will is smiling and then he remembers that his mother is dead and feels an insurmountable sadness for her, unable to remember the last time she had really laughed and meant it.

The stag pushes more into Will and Will puts his face into the warm silvery skin and finds tears making it wet. He tries to get away from the stag then, unwilling to make it uncomfortable, for Will still remembered what Netitia said about rude people and how the moonstag ate rude people and really, he knew enough to not go rubbing his tears and snot on another individual. The stag tries to keep itself pressed into Will and when Will still manages to wriggle free, the stag suddenly transforms into a human, with hair the colour of moonlight and the moonbeam streamers that was hanging on the antlers suddenly becoming a torn loincloth for a very naked and older man. 

Before Will can be alarmed, the man had swept Will onto his arms, and wrapped him in his big hands, Will almost disappearing into his arms. 

“What ails thee, child?” the moonman asks now, his voice cool and shivery.

“My mother is dead,” Will sobs, for he is still crying just like the small boy he is.

The moonman pushes his head into the space between his neck and shoulder and sways him around like how people do with crying babies and whispers to it, “Everything is going to be alright now that I am here.”

The next morning, Will wakes up in his bed and feeling oddly refreshed. Netitia is pleasantly surprised at first but then when Will recounts the happenings of the night, she is less pleased. Perhaps she should not have let the child sleep so long to end up dreaming of the moonstag.

In the subsequent days, Will keeps Netitia abreast of what he had done with Hannibal – one day it is catch rabbits in a thick forest and other Will was taken on a journey to the depth of the ocean. Will certainly keeps Netitia entertained. Something niggles at the back of her head, but she is just happy at seeing Will happy, and leaves things be.

That is until she sees Will start speaking to the air near him as if a there were a real human there. She confides into one of the neighbour woman how she is worried about Will and gets convinced that this is Will just coping with the loss of his mother. Still, something pulls at her brain and she for the love of god could not remember it. So she writes a letter to his sister, who was just a year older than her and asks about the old tales of the moonstag that she had heard. Her sister is ecstatic at getting her letter and replies very soon. Netitia gets the letter and hardly finds the time to read it at first, too busy looking after a Will who seems to have found a good hiding nook or place for he vanishes from thin air sometimes it seems.

One night, Will gives Netitia a kiss on her cheek and informs her plainly that he would be leaving his with the moonstag. Netitia gives him the kiss he had demanded and two more on his other cheek and his forehead and tells him not to leave as it will make Netitia very lonely indeed. Will looks sad at that but says nothing else, turning into the bed to sleep.

That night is the first time since she received the letter that Netitia finds the time to read it. She plunks the candle onto her dressing table and opens envelope. She is engulfed with the love that comes through from her sister, with news about her other family members that she hadn’t heard off. Then her sister supplies the stories she had heard about the moonstag, how he wears the broken moonbeams like streamers on its rack and how it eats rude people and the like. She however has one more tale that makes Netitia’s heart jump in one quick heartbeat. She pushes away from her chair and runs to Will’s room, she with her old bones and weak knees and she runs and opens the door, just in time to see Will going away through the open window astride over the moonstag that she had seen so many moons ago.

Netitia cries for Will, screaming for him to come back and Will does not even look back, just seems to disappear into the streaming moonlight like mist. Netitia cries and cries, calling on anyone who could hear her. Soon enough the whole village is roused, but no one finds Will ever again, except for the line of black dots that leads from the Will’s window to nowhere.

Within the next few days, Netitia packs up her stuff and prepares to leave, no longer worried about the old Master Graham anymore. She fingers the letter that her sister sent and reads the last moonstag tale that she had heard while still little. The letter in Netitia’s sister’s cursive reads, 

‘...and what about the one where the moonstag ate humans huh? Speaking of humans, did you ever heard about the one where some moonstag takes away humans to be their bride every now and then, usually small children in some sad state and apparently will manifest before them like a human figure they will love and accept and that they will steal away the human child to be their bride when they grow up? That was not a story I liked, how the moonstag would feed the human child only moonlight till it would too start glowing and yet still be a human with human life and the moonstag would keep the child safe but the human would ultimately die and mist away, too unsubstantial to even have a funeral. Yes, that one was one not for small children I think...’

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks for reading. Unbetaed. Comments and kudos please.


End file.
